Anti-racism protesters in Portland, Oregon, on Tuesday accosted an Asian passerby after mistaking him for conservative journalist Andy Ngo, who is of Vietnamese heritage.
Video of the protest taken by a freelance journalist showed the group of protesters cursing and gesturing profanely at the unidentified man, whom they referred to as Ngo, as he walked past them in a business suit and face mask.
The man stopped and confronted his hecklers, saying, "Do you think that I'm Andy Ngo? Is that what you're thinking?”
- He went on, in calm but occasionally obscene language, to say he was not Ngo and to accuse the protesters of being racist while protesting racism.
- The man said it was the third time he had been mistaken for Ngo at the demonstrations, which have been held nightly in Portland for the past six weeks and have often turned violent.
This is from earlier, a man gets upset with protestors for confusing him with someone else “I’m not Andy” pic.twitter.com/3rBXCapD2y
— Sergio Olmos (@MrOlmos) July 14, 2020
Ngo, a Portland-based video journalist and editor at The Post Millennial, later posted a different video of the exchange, commenting, “Idiots.”
"This isn’t the first or even the second time these so-called 'anti-racist' activists have accused a random Asian person of being me,” Ngo told The Post Millennial. "This isn’t the first or even the second time these so-called 'anti-racist' activists have accused a random Asian person of being me."
Ngo frequently covers left-wing protests and violence in Portland and elsewhere and the United States, and has become infamous among some activists.
- Antifa protesters assaulted him at a rally in Portland last July.
Many conservatives, including Ngo and President Donald Trump, have attributed rioting amid nationwide anti-racism protests to antifa, a loose-knit and sometimes-violent anti-fascist network.
- Law enforcement and federal officials have said both far-left and far-right extremists have fueled the violence, but scant evidence of the claims has so far emerged.